DVD Review: ‘My Winnipeg’ reflects the director’s eye

Guy Maddin is the most idiosyncratic current filmmaker to come out of Winnipeg... or Canada... or the world... in the last few decades. From his first feature, “Tales from the Gimli Hospital” (1988), through his short “The Heart of the World” (2000) to his ballet film, “Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary” (2002), Maddin has filtered all sorts of genres and tropes through his distinctive, often retro sensibility.

“My Winnipeg” was commissioned by the Documentary Channel, but it’s not entirely recognizable as a documentary; Maddin calls it a docu-fantasia, which seems fair. The director’s voice-over hypnotically leads us through the Winnipeg of history, the Winnipeg of his childhood, the Winnipeg of dreams. (Winnipeg has 10 times as many sleepwalkers as any other city in the world, the film alleges.)

The Criterion Blu-ray looks and sounds fine, faithful to a visual style that is frequently deliberately grainy and composed partly of clips from old newsreels and home movies. The package includes a plethora of first-rate extras that make it altogether worthwhile.

Art critic Robert Enright interviews Maddin for roughly an hour about the film and its development. We also get four bizarre “cine-essays” about Winnipeg by Maddin collaborator Evan Johnson; a deleted scene from the feature about hallway runners; three Maddin shorts with introductions; and an animated short Maddin narrated. Less interesting, but still unusual, is a nine-minute short about a Toronto screening of the feature, with the director narrating live.

My Winnipeg (Criterion, Blu-ray, $39.95; DVD, $29.95)

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ANDY KLEIN is the film critic for Marquee. He can also be heard on “FilmWeek” on KPCC-FM (89.3).